Anglicanism, too—­uncleansed, as it notoriously is, of a Calvinistic taint, broken up by absolute license of dissent, maintaining a mere outward conformity to an extremely lax discipline—­affronted Isaac Hecker’s ideal of the communion of man and God; man seeking and God giving the one only revelation of divine truth, unifying and organizing the Christian community:  and this in spite of an attraction for the beauty of the Episcopal service which he often confesses in his diary.

In the same scrupulous spirit he tried the Baptists, though he must have known that they were, almost without exception, Calvinists.  He had a conference with one of their ministers which, from the account he gives of it, must have degenerated into something like a wrangle.  “If,” said young Hecker, “you admit that baptism is not a saving ordinance, why, then, do you separate yourselves from the rest of Christendom on a mere question of ceremonial observance?” There could be no satisfactory answer to this question.

As to the Methodists, they made fifty years ago much less pretension to an intellectual footing in the religious world than at the present day.  One thing, Father Hecker tells us, drew his sympathetic regards their way—­their doctrine of perfection.  He went to one of their ministers, a Dr. Crawford.  “I have read in the Bible,” said he, “’If thou wouldst be perfect, go and sell all thou hast’; now, that is the kind of Christian I want to be.”  The answer was:  “Well, young man, you must not carry things too far; you are too enthusiastic.  Christ does not require that of us in the nineteenth century.”  After conversing with him for some time, the minister told him to give up such ideas and study for the ministry.

A singular episode in his search was his meeting with two enthusiastic Mormon apostles, and a long and careful examination, under their guidance, of the then newly-delivered revelations and prophecies of Joseph Smith.  He describes his Mormon acquaintances as men of some intelligence, but given over, totally and blindly, to Smith’s imposture.

But what cut under the claims of every form of Protestantism was the error, common to them all, concerning the rule of faith:  the private and independent judgment of the teaching of Scripture made by each man for himself.  As the real owner of a homestead has most reason to dread a dealer in false titles, so the truly free man has most reason to dread false liberty.  Isaac Hecker was the type of rational individual liberty, hence the very man to abhor most the caricature of that prerogative in the typical Protestant.